Hi!<br /><br />I'm Myungsunn, from Korea. Recently joined the forum. I'm self-tutoring greek in a really slow progress. From time to time when I get leisure and when I feel like. I'm also interested in other old languages that will lead me to the ancient cultures, when people began to create from nothing. But I'm no dedicated student of humanties. It's like my hobby to learn the old tongues.<br /><br />----<br /><br />I'm currently editing Euclid's Elements, the text is from Perseus and I'm drawing pictures with a meta-drawing program called after [face=SPIonic][size=18=12]Eukleidhj[/face][/size]. The text from Perseus is no open source, so I'm afraid I can't share the final product in public. Let me know any possible detour to this limitation. ;D<br />

hey, welcome here! and good luck with your self studies...<br /><br />I don't have an answer for your Euclid problem, but there must be some open source version somewhere... the text is old enough ;) check gutenberg maybe....

Thanks! <br /><br />Euclid is one of the least digitalized author(to say, in greek, as well as other greek mathematicians, i.e. Apollonius). Almost all other sites that refer Euclid points to Perseus, and Perseus digitalized Euclid only very recently. (I purchased a Perseus CD-ROM of greek texts several years ago and it didn't contain Euclid then. )<br /><br />Euclid is hard to understand(if interpreted) without the aid of pictures. so I wished to insert proper diagrams to the rare text.<br />For the main configuration of the diagrams I referred to David Joyce's web site for Euclid's Elements at Clark University.<br /><br />I'm doing the job with LaTeX. Because I'm not a skilled user of LaTeX there are some technical limitations I cannot shunt neatly, and I'm bound to use specific encoding scheme for the greek text, let aside that there's no other complete source for Euclid in greek. So thus stuck with Perseus source, I'm considering handing it out through some popular P2P network. ;D<br />

Welcome to Textkit! Euclid I'm afraid I can't help you with; mathematics of any kind is a killer for me. I know a little more about copyrights, but not much... However, I wish you the best of luck! <br /><br />Keesa

Hi there!<br /><br />Wow, someone else who is drawn to the Greeks because they "began to create from nothing" - AND is doing work with Euclid - you and I, we'll get along just fine! <br /><br />The *translation* of Euclid is copyrighted - not the original writing. I'm not sure if that fact helps you, but perhaps it would do well to keep that at the back of your mind.<br /><br />So welcome, and I hope to hear more from you...<br /><br />

[quote author=Raya link=board=6;threadid=520;start=0#4610 date=1061495417]<br />The *translation* of Euclid is copyrighted - not the original writing. [/quote]<br /><br />I never knew that a translation of a work could be copyrighted. Are there other works which also have this limitation?

[quote author=mariek link=board=6;threadid=520;start=0#4806 date=1061711779]<br /><br />I never knew that a translation of a work could be copyrighted. Are there other works which also have this limitation?<br />[/quote]<br /><br />I would also be interested in knowing this; I'm always on the lookout for copyright laws that I've never heard of.

If you were to translate something that was out of copyright and in the public domain, would you hold the copyright to it once you had translated it? (I'm thinking of a beautiful little French book right now, but it would apply to Latin, also...) <br /><br />Keesa

As far as I know you would hold the copyright for the translation, but not for the original work. Thus Penguin, for example, might hold the copyright for the translations in the Penguin Classics series, but they wouldn't hold the copyright for the original works. If you want to translate a work which is still in copyright, then you would need the permission of the copyright holder to publish your translation. <br /><br />I have no idea of whether a scholarly edition of the text of an ancient author could be copyrighted. I assume the notes and apparatus criticus could be, but not the actual work.

I checked the copyright of the Oxford Classical Texts-series, and it says that no part may be reproduced &c. That suggests that the text too (and not only the app. criticus) is copyrighted.<br />A scholarly edition is not just a reprint of a standard text: it's an original work, as it is different from any other edition of the same work.<br />So: there is a copyright on some editions of classical texts, but others may be old enough to be copyright-free by now.<br /><br />Ptolemaios

i think it also depends on how the "original" text came about.<br /><br />i know with new testament stuff there are SO many manuscripts and fragments etc that any version of the GNT has been pieced together by somebody and it is painstaking and difficult work to decide which pieces are authoritative and such (there's a whole science to it called textual criticism). so by the time they arrive at a complete work, they've invested enough in it to copyright their version of the "original". that's why only the Textus Receptus is public domain for the GNT. The version currently accepted as the best is by Nestle and Aland, and the text itself is copyrighted as well as the apparatus.<br /><br />So I assume the same sort of thing can happen with other ancient texts.

Encoding greek (with all the accents and marks) would be another kind of painstaking job that's worth to claim copyrights, hmm, no wonder, I see. <br />Should I copyright my drawings and sell the images-only version of Elements?(jusk kidding ;D)<br />